The latest, greatest Mac client – Mozy for Mac version 2.6 – is in beta and you’re invited to participate in the beta process. We’re very excited about the changes in this release, including substantial improvements in memory utilization, and we’d sure appreciate your help validating this release.

The latest builds are available here and they’ll simply install as an upgrade to your current Mozy application:

SEATTLE – March 14, 2012 – Mozy®, the industry-leading online backup service, released the surprising results of a data protection survey. The survey, produced by Mozy and independent market research firm Compass Partners, LLC, found that an increasing number of professionals (80 percent) work remotely and rely on personal devices such as smartphones (63 percent), iPads (30 percent) and laptops (80 percent) to access company data. Despite the expectation that professionals with sensitive client data would understand the associated risks and responsibilities, the numbers reflect that many professionals working remotely, and their companies, are either unaware or too casual about how to keep this information safe and secure.

The study profiled several professions that routinely handle sensitive client information, including medical practices, legal, real estate, and financial service firms. It found that they were at even greater risk compared to generalized small and medium businesses to experience a significant loss of sensitive business information.

The survey found that while over two-thirds of all small-to-midsize businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees have a formal procedure for backing up company data, 87 percent have no formal policy in place regarding employees’ use of personal devices for work purposes. One-third of companies let employees make their own decisions about how to back up company and client data on their devices, and most companies polled do not have backup or data recovery plans that meet modern standards for data protection. Forty-one percent of small businesses readily store and back up company data on portable USB devices – which may be used by family members, get lost, or even stolen.

Businesses Still Unaware of Risks

Legal professionals trailed the field, with 78 percent of lawyers reporting they were either not at all concerned, not that concerned or only somewhat concerned about the security of their company data for employees using personal devices for work. While financial services and medical firms are more concerned about the security of their company data than companies in real estate, construction, and law, the majority (more than two-thirds) in each of those industries expressed a lack of concern for risk of loss and security of company data. This lack of discipline creates unnecessary risk in the protection of company and customer data. The numbers do not lie: very important people have very important data that should be better protected.

Without adequate backup and other data security policies, many businesses are ill prepared to protect company and customer data in the event of a hard drive crash, loss or theft. The survey shows that 30 percent of companies suffered a hard drive crash in the past year. In 70 percent of those cases, data was not fully recovered.

The risk of lost or stolen data is more serious than ever with changing work habits and more employees holding sensitive company data on personal devices. With the start of the new year’s business travel season and a larger number than ever of professionals on the road, they carry sensitive company or client data with them on their laptops, tablets and smartphones. The Mozy survey shows that one in nine businesses have experienced the theft of a laptop, and in 98 percent of such cases they were not able to recover all of the lost data.

While just over two-thirds of companies surveyed do have formal backup processes, most are using antiquated methods such as external hard drives with no online backup connection, or tape. Both are extremely susceptible to failure in the event of an on-site disaster.

New Season, Better Protection

“Companies can ‘spring clean’ by ensuring they have defined best practices and policies to protect sensitive company and client information,” said Gytis Barzdukas, Director of Product Management at Mozy.

“If employees are using personal devices for work, companies should consider what kind of work can be performed on their devices, and how to ensure that confidential information is not at risk if the device is lost or stolen. If your company doesn’t have a backup and data recovery policy today, they really should put even a basic plan in place. Using tape, server and thumb drives is a start, but any good backup plan should consist of having both a local and offsite copy,” Barzdukas continued. “Mozy recommends that all company data – whether it resides on employee personal devices or company equipment – be automatically backed up to a secure, reliable location.”

About Mozy

Mozy is the world’s most trusted online backup service for consumers and businesses, with more than three million customers, 70,000 business users and 70 petabytes of information stored at its multiple data centers around the globe. Mozy was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2007 and operates as part of Decho Corporation, an EMC company. More information can be found at www.mozy.com .

About the Study

The study was executed by Compass Partners LLC, an independent market research firm focused on consumer technology. The study was fielded among 641 business decision makers responsible for the purchase of software and computer related services for small and medium businesses with 1 – 1,000 full-time employees. Field dates were October 24 through November 1, 2011. For each industry vertical sampled (each cell contained a minimum of 100 responses), the margin of error is +/- 9.8% at 95% confidence interval.

Despite having been through it all once before, I made the rookie bridegroom mistake of thinking that once the wedding was done, all of the stresses involved in that specific day in our lives would be over. After all, the wedding had gone off without a hitch, everyone involved had a good time, we had a great destination event with family and friends, and being in our 50’s, I thought we had all of the bases covered. After all, this was the second time around for both of us.

I was wrong.

Despite a pretty high level of technical awareness, my years of focusing on business technology, from basic hardware through designing data centers had ill prepared me for the changes that had happened in a small corner of the consumer technology world; the wedding photographs.

The first time I got married, sometime back in the 20th century, the wedding photo book process went like this: The photographer sent you proofs, you picked out the photos that you liked, the photographer delivered a wedding book made up of those prints. You complained about some part of it, then went on with your life.

It doesn’t seem to work like that anymore.

We received 7 gigabytes worth of pictures on CD; this might seem like a good thing (it did to my wife) but to me it meant that there were close to a thousand images that had to be sorted through. And as a fairly decent amateur photographer, it meant that I could look at an image and see how just the right post processing might make it a better picture.

So much for the simple yes/no judgment for each of those images.

To make it worse, my wife really wanted to be able to create lots of different photo books, with the intent to eventually print them. A book for her parents, a book for mine, one for her bridesmaids, one for my only sibling (we had taken lots of pictures the day before the wedding itself). And while she was more than willing to start sorting images, it was up to me to do the post processing. And get her the two or three hundred images that she had narrowed her selection down to for all those different photo books.

Traveling photos

To make my life just a little more complex, my wife’s job requires that she travel a fair amount. And when she traveled for business she often met up with old friends and wanted to show them the wedding pictures. This meant that before she left on each trip she would ask me to put a selection of the pictures on her tablet. Of course, I never seemed to have the pictures she wanted available to be copied to her tablet, with the post processing of the images being relatively low priority in the crush of events that define our lives.

Fortunately for our marriage, the cloud actually came to the rescue. Using a cloud backup service with a client for her tablet, I was able to create some working directories that replicated to the cloud from my desktop, and she was able to pull images that she wanted to show off down to her tablet whenever she wanted them, eventually deciding on a core set of images that she stored locally, and others that she downloaded to show specific people. Most importantly, from the husband perspective, was that it took me out of the loop. She had all of her images available, without using up a large percentage of her local storage, she could see what images were in the pre-or post-processing stage, and with a simple email to me, while she traveled, she could ask to have a specific image edited to her liking, often so she could have it printed out for a family member she was seeing in her travels.

It’s been six months and she’s still trying to decide which images get printed for who, but with the cloud making all of the pictures available to her wherever she happens to be, my honey-do list has gotten significantly shorter.

Last week, I presented about the results-so-far of the Stash public beta at our bi-weekly Mozy-internal all-hands presentation. As part of it, my buddies in Marketing armed me with the new Stash t-shirt. It looks a little like this:

Within a couple hours, a friend and former Mozy colleague contacted me via Twitter asking:

@reverendted Hey, I really want a stash shirt. What do I need to do to get one?

How could I say no? Tom was instrumental to making Stash happen. In fact, Tom’s latest blog post provides insight into The secret history of Mozy Stash. Tom sports his Stash shirt for the occasion.

Maybe you’re wondering the same thing that Tom originally came to me about. If so, then here’s a hint: we send an occasional shirt out to some of the Stash beta participants who are most active in the Stash forum.

It can be a challenge running a small business. As a small business owner, you’ll often find that no task is too big or too small for you to handle, from contending with macro problems such as rising fuel costs, to more at-hand issues such as discovering that a part-time employee mistakenly unplugged a tucked-away power strip and that’s why half the work stations in the office are offline.

With much to worry about and never enough staff to cover all the bases, cloud computing has the potential to ease the strain of running a small business while cutting costs in the process.

Small and midsize businesses in the United States will spend more than $49 billion on cloud services in 2015, nearly double the size of the market today, according to research from AMI Partners. Donald Best, an analyst at AMI, chalked up the growth to a combination of reliable broadband, thin applications and the financial incentive to smaller businesses – namely, that cloud services do not require significant costs to acquire.

“It’s a factor of IT spending increasing, and it’s also an increasing percentage of total spending that’s going to the cloud,” Best said in an interview with InformationWeek.

The AMI study revealed that SMBs are currently setting aside 10 percent of IT budgets for cloud services. This number is expected to grow to 15 percent by 2015.

The number of cloud services aimed at SMBs also continues to grow, which is a great benefit to business owners. The following services or products cover some of the essential components of running a small business in the cloud. While there are many choices out there, here are just a few that make running a business a little bit easier with a little help from above – the cloud.

This is an obvious choice, but it’s tough to beat the cost and simplicity of running Google Apps. If you plan to integrate Google Docs into a collaborative workspace, complete with email and calendaring, Google Apps is the way to go.

Skype continues to improve its VOIP quality. Its updated interface makes video calls a snap. Since Microsoft purchased Skype, Redmond is working to integrate Skype across its entire product portfolio, with more robust software being developed for both server and client environments.

Ultra-customizable, Intuit’s QuickBase is a business-class online database that comes from a long-established vendor that can be trusted. QuickBase can house any type of data, from invoices to inventory. It’s fast, reliable and has many native applications to get you up and running in a flash.

Bill.com automates small-business accounting by reducing the time and paperwork required for accounts payable. With Bill.com, you get a complete Web-based “finance department” to organize day-to-day finances and optimize cash flow.

As cloud computing continues to evolve from a novelty to a buzzword to a household term, its impact will undoubtedly be felt in organizations both large and small. The following posts provide some insight into the latest issues with cloud computing that are definitely worth a closer look.

The Cloud: Mover of All Things Across the Internet

ZDNet’s Cloud Builders blog touched on the recent Cloud Expo Europe (CEE) and the state of cloud computing today. According to Cloud Builders’ author Alan Priestley, “One of the most interesting speeches was delivered by David King, CTO of Logica, the outsourcing company. He compared the cloud of today with the railroads of the last century, in which the movement of goods across continents became vastly easier and in turn helped transform business.”

King said the sharing elements of cloud usage are where new business models are forming, which he attributes to public sector services and business services finding new ways to share information and extract greater value from that information.

Big Data Today Is What the Web Was in ‘93

GigaOM’s Structureblog recently tackled the growth of big data, its adoption issues and how big data jibes with cloud computing. Mark Thiele, executive vice president of Data Center Tech at Switch, wrote on the Structure blog that “big data today is what the Web was in 1993. We knew the Web was something and that it might get big, but few of us really understood what ‘big’ meant. Today, I believe we aren’t even scratching the surface of the big data opportunity.”

With this opportunity comes many complex issues, such as

Where will that data reside?

If your big data is running in a public cloud, what tools and strategies will you use to make that data available to customers and other applications?

The VC firm could invest $100 million in the cloud space this year. The announcement isn’t very surprising, with groups such as Market Research Media projecting the cloud computing market will grow at about 30 percent a year, reaching $270 billion in 2020.

With tax season here, many of us are rounding up receipts, checking our W2 forms, and meeting with accountants to get ready to submit our taxes. Now that so much of this information is stored online, data storage, backup, and sharing become even more important. MozyHome online backup and Mozy Stash can help make this record compiling and storage much easier.

Here is one Mozy user’s story from earlier this year:

“I met with my accountant recently to prepare my taxes and accidentally forgot to bring my W-2 form. Since the form is essential for tax preparation, my accountant was ready to postpone our meeting until I had all the proper documentation. But I had a Plan B: My W-2 form was in my work computer’s local Stash folder. So I pulled out my iPhone, opened the Mozy mobile app, found my W-2, and emailed it to my dumbfounded accountant sitting across from me.

My accountant is a MozyPro customer, so he understands the need for backup. But the fact my work computer synced with my phone and other computers to enable me to access my files anywhere was astounding to him! When I explained that Mozy Stash is available to MozyHome customers now and that it’d soon be available for him to use on his MozyPro account, he was chomping at the bit to use it for himself. He just may never need to carry a briefcase full of paper documents again!”

Get the most out of Mozy

Mozy’s backup and file synchronization features can make tax time a breeze. Do you use an Intuit product to help with your personal or business finances and taxes? Make sure to check out this post on backing up Intuit data.

Overview

Stash is one of the hottest features ever added to the Mozy service. Although only in beta, thousands and thousands of MozyHome customers have added Stash to their account. Check out the Stash page to find out more about it.

From the Stash beta, one of the most frequently requested features has to do with the Mozy app. Many have asked for the capability to upload files from their mobile device to their Stash. It’s been possible to upload photos and videos to your Stash for a while, but not other types of files. The latest version of the Mozy app now makes it possible to upload any type of file, so that the file is then available on any of your linked computers.

Let take a look at how to do so, using my iPhone as an example. That means that the examples will be specific to iOS (which also covers iPad and iPod touch), but the workflow is similar on Android. We’ll start by showing how to send a file from the Mozy app to another app on your device. Then, we’ll show how to send a modified version back to your Stash. Along the way, I’ll mention some of the things we plan to make even better within the next couple releases.

Sending Files from Mozy to Other Mobile Apps

Even in previous versions, the Mozy app has allowed you to send files to other apps. The workflow is fairly similar, depending on whether you’re using the iOS version or the Android version of the Mozy app.

For this example, we’ll download a PowerPoint presentation and send it to Documents to Go. Start by downloading the file that you want to send to another app. Once downloaded, tap the Actions button. Then tap the Open in… button.

After that, you can select whatever applications are available.

Note 1 The available applications on this screen depends on which have registered themselves as handlers for the type of file in question. If an application is not available, then it probably is unable to accept the type of file you’re trying to send to it.

Note 2 (Android) The model used by Android presents you with a “Share” button in place of “Open In…” The Share button may look a little like this:

Note 3 (iOS) While crafting this post I noticed that the Mozy app pre-pends filenames with a series of numbers. (It’s actually a milliseconds timestamp for the file.) We’ll clean that up in the next update.

Sending Files from Another App to Your Stash

Now for new feature: if you have Stash, you can upload files from other mobile apps right to your Stash!

If you have an application that supports sending files to other apps (using “Open In” on iOS, or “Share” on Android), then you can send the file directly to your Stash. Let’s take a look at how to do it, again using my iPhone as an example.

This time, we start from Documents to Go’s “Local” tab. From there, tap the Details icon to the right of the document’s name. Then, tap the Open In button on the upper right of the Details page. Finally, select Mozy as the target application.

Your device will now take you into the Mozy app, where you can confirm the upload. (The confirmation prevents rogue apps from uploading without permission.)

When the upload completes, you can find the file in the “Mobile Uploads” folder in your Stash.”Mobile Uploads” is a default folder currently used by the Mozy app. In a future update, we plan to provide a folder selection dialog, allowing you to select the target folder for uploading.

This morning, we released the latest edition of the Mozy app for Android to the Android Market. You can download it from there now. (If you have a Kindle Fire, it will be a few more days before Amazon completes its review for the Amazon App Store.)

With that, let’s continue our series of posts on the latest edition of Mozy app. This time, we take a look at something just for Android–whether it be the phone you got from your mobile carrier, your Kindle Fire, your Galaxy tablet, or your Nook.

As noted in the previous post, the app has a new My Mozy home screen. On Android devices only, there is a Downloaded item on the home screen. This allows you to view and use any files you’ve already downloaded–even when you don’t have an internet connection.

When you tap the Downloaded item on the “My Mozy” home screen, you see the different locations from which you have downloaded files:

When you select a location, you can then see whatever files that you have previously downloaded:

Of course to download files, your device must have an SD card to store whatever you download.

Having just released the latest version of the Mozy app, we’re doing a series of blog posts covering some of the new features in the app. In our previous episode, we looked at the new My Mozy home page, and how the app now can remember multiple Mozy accounts for faster login.

Now let’s take a look at Favorites in the iPhone app. Okay, it’s also the iPad app. And, it’s also the iPod touch app. Well, technically speaking, since it supports all three, I guess it’s the iOS app. But our marketing peeps tell me that a lot of people don’t know the name iOS. So I always end up using all three names. Anyway, let’s get to the point…

You can view offline files on iOS devices by making the file a “favorite.” Start by downloading a file. Once it downloads, tap the star in the bottom right of the viewer to mark it as a favorite.

After doing so, the app will keep a copy of the file on your device so you can view it even without an Internet connection.

I should note one important thing about Favorites. This version of the app doesn’t automatically update your favorites. (We’re working on it!) So, if you have updated a “favorite” file from your computer and then back it up (or sync it with Stash), you might still see the old version on your iOS device when you view it while offline. If you view it when your iOS device does have an Internet connection, then the app will download the update.

In our next post, we’ll take a look at something similar for Android devices…like your Kindle Fire, Droid X, Galaxy Tablet, HTC Desire HD, and…oh, there I go again. I guess you get the point.